Making Music Against the Odds

ENLARGE

The musicians come from a nation where not very long ago music was outlawed by the Taliban.
US State Department

By

Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Updated Feb. 11, 2013 11:57 p.m. ET

Washington

Afghanistan and the misery of war have been synonymous for decades. But at the Kennedy Center Thursday, the U.S. debut of the Afghan Youth Orchestra revealed a new facet of this nation's history. A hopeful one, however tenuous.

Seated cross-legged around the conductor's podium, on a u-shaped arrangement of risers covered in Afghan rugs, were smiling girls and boys—some as young as 10, others at the cusp of adulthood. Wearing colorful national dress, they played lutelike rubabs and tanburs; ghichaks, which look like banjos but are played with a bow; sitars; a variety of drums and other traditional instruments—in a combination of youthful joy and pride and sheer gratitude for what they have accomplished through access to music and education.

The program featured arrangements of Afghan and Indian folk music and "The Four Seasons of Afghanistan," Antonio Vivaldi's familiar quartet of violin concertos especially arranged by their conductor, the American William Harvey. To complete their cultural bridge between East and West, these Afghan musicians rehearsed and performed alongside members of the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra. Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall they'll be joining members of the Scarsdale Youth Symphony Orchestra, and adding Maurice Ravel's "Bolèro" to the mix.

The Afghan Youth Orchestra performs Tuesday at Carnegie Hall in New York, a feat for a nation in which music was outlawed by the Taliban in the not-distant past.

A few years ago, these young musicians knew nothing of the Kennedy Center, or Vivaldi and Ravel, or the U.S. State Department, where they played for Secretary of State John Kerry. Some were in orphanages; others were supporting their impoverished families by hawking goods on the hard, joyless pavements of Kabul. Now they are students of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, and though, in many cases, their domestic life is still challenging, they are receiving an education and being offered a purpose in life.

Inaugurated in 2010, with major underwriting from the World Bank, the ANIM is the brainchild of Ahmad Sarmast, Afghanistan's first citizen to hold a doctorate in music, and his achievement is all the more remarkable in a nation where the overthrown Taliban regime had declared not just performing but even listening to music a crime against Islam. His efforts have been documented in the 2012 Australian film "Dr. Sarmast's Music School."

In 2006, Mr. Sarmast, whose late father had been a celebrated Afghan musician and composer, was a research fellow at the Monash Asia Institute in Melbourne, Australia, when he initiated the "Revival of Afghan Music" project while Afghanistan struggled to restore itself following its long civil war. Discussing by email his school and its place in Afghan society, he expressed his belief that "an important part of democracy is to offer people the chance to express themselves by means of art and music," noting that "the original concept of the project was to make music education accessible to the most underprivileged class of Afghan society, the orphans and street kids."

"There is a very, very old Afghan proverb," he observed. "Music is the food for the soul. Music was always an important part of social and cultural life of Afghanistan, depending on the religion at various times, beginning with Zoroastrianism through Buddhism, through pre-Islamic traditions, and in Islamic tradition music was closely associated with Sufism or mysticism."

He acknowledged that "Some negative attitudes towards music did exist a long time ago, and they were revived during the Taliban regime, such as the right of women to participate in music. Nowadays the institute occasionally becomes a target of some family members who under this negative influence try to remove a child or deprive a child of his or her rights to a musical education. But we have successfully advocated with the members of such families who have had some hesitations about the participation of their sisters and brothers in the music program. From the day ANIM was established those hesitations are becoming fewer and fewer."

We may want to receive Mr. Sarmast's optimism guardedly. As this paper reported on Feb. 1, the magnitude of the challenges facing this tour, the Afghan Youth Orchestra and the ANIM have been formidable. Not least among them has been asserting the rights of women and girls to study music—indeed to study at all. And as the U.S.-led coalition withdraws from Afghanistan, increasingly conservative trends may well threaten this pioneering education project again.

But as a great cultural experiment, the music and performances in concert bespoke Mr. Sarmast's current success across two hemispheres. The packed house included numerous Afghan expatriates. And in the opening number, "Da zemong Ziba Watan," when the full ensemble let loose with Eastern drums—tabla, dhol, zirbaghali—pounding out the infectious, syncopated rhythm, the audience began to clap along to this tune popularized by Mr. Sarmast's father. When the coda moved into a rapid double-time, there wasn't a false or dropped note anywhere.

The idiom of this music often moved away from the poignant, seductive minor-key flavor of Balkan, Arabic and Klezmer music. Instead, several pieces are based on the Lydian scale (play it on your white piano keys from F to F). It's a major-key sound, but unlike our major keys, which have a half step between the third and fourth tones, the Lydian scale has a whole step there, and the half step between steps four and five. This lends a fresh, exotic subtlety to the bright major-key sound. And to hear "The Four Seasons" interwoven with the instrumental cantillations, syncopated rhythms and bracing timbres of lands far to the east of Baroque Venice is to hear them anew.

In the documentary, Mr. Sarmast observes that "Afghanistan lacks an orchestra capable of performing our national anthem," and voices his dreams "someday to have composers capable of arranging recent classical pieces for an orchestra of Afghan musical instruments, and of having a symphony orchestra capable of performing Afghan pieces in new arrangements according to Western Classical tradition."

Asked by email if Afghanistan has ever had a Western-style symphony orchestra, he replied: "No. But I believe the Afghan Youth Orchestra formed within the ANIM could be the backbone of the future Symphony Orchestra of Afghanistan."

It will be a while before these splendid, hopeful young musicians can go head to head with the New York Philharmonic. But after hearing them play with such gusto, one cannot but root for their future and security in the uncertain times ahead.

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